Karl Rove: “Some people today describe America as a third-world dystopian hellhole. That’s a slur. Though a flawed people, we’re also deeply compassionate and generous. We’ve built the world’s most innovative, prosperous economy. We cherish liberty and the rule of law. In this century, we’re the bulwark against tyranny in the world; in the last one, we rescued civilization at enormous cost. In return, we didn’t seek reparations, only enough land to bury our dead. The world knows it. Go anywhere and people understand the American dream. It means the opportunity to work hard, think big, live in liberty, and be part of a great and grand story. Sure, we have challenges, but still people around the globe want to invest, study and live here more than any other place on the planet. We’re a light of freedom and hope. If we forget that, we surrender an important part of what it means to be an American.”
Mint: “Meetings are essential for decision-making, aligning a team and fostering collaboration. However, to be effective, group meetings need to be well-structured. This includes having a clear agenda, defined objectives and ensuring the right people are in attendance. Avoiding unnecessary presentations and focusing on dialogue and decision-making can make them productive. But even before getting to ‘how best to run a meeting,’ we think it is important to answer two key questions. The first is whether there should be a meeting at all, or can the objective be met through an empowered individual (with inputs from others) or even in a group setting via email? This is even more relevant for recurring meetings, which start off with the right intention but then inertia takes over. The second is clarity on the desired objective of the meeting—is it to generate ideas, challenge solutions, take decisions, seek alignment or communicate with a broader group? Meetings can be set for any of these, but there needs to be clarity on what outcome is expected.”
NYTimes on UK exit polls: “Earlier exit polls sought to assemble a representative sample of voting places at each election, using the vote totals in the sample to predict shares for each party elsewhere. The new-style poll still looks for a representative sample, but it also returns, as far as possible, to the same polling places each time. Now, instead of focusing on the totals, the researchers can make direct comparisons and examine how the vote has changed. Using statistical models, they then project how the changes they find will play out in districts across the country, based on further analysis of the demographics and the previous election results in each area. The focus on the same locations is the critical thing, according to Jouni Kuha, a professor of social statistics at the London School of Economics who has worked on the exit-polling team since 2010. “There’s less noise in the data when you look at the changes than if you were trying to estimate the shares themselves,” he said in a telephone interview.”
FT: “In the past, new tech eras — such as the rise of client-server computing in the 1990s and cloud computing the following decade — have brought new waves of start-up software companies to the fore. New companies, their products and business models designed from the ground up to fit a new computing paradigm start with a big advantage. The first wave of these “AI native” software companies has often looked like little more than “wrappers” around the large language models, adding only a veneer of industry-specific expertise as they offer businesses ways to adopt generative AI. But they are all working hard to gain a foothold from where they can start to build out more compelling services. According to Salesforce’s Benioff, the incumbents will be hard to unseat. Companies such as his have become the repositories of their customers’ most important data, he says, giving them a big advantage when it comes to training the AI models that businesses will find truly useful.”
